The Pirate Bay appears set to sail again on 1 February like a phoenix from the ashes of a police raid.
Photograph: Screengrab

Pirate Bay’s revival seems certain after the torrent site has started to display a logo of phoenix with a timer counting down to 1 February.

The timer was unveiled last week along with a revived but non-functioning site. Now the phoenix, a symbol of rebirth used by the Pirate Bay in previous relaunches of the site, has replaced the iconic battleship logo and the animated waving pirate flag.

On the homepage, the Pirate Bay battleship travels towards a cartoon of an island harbour named “welcome home”, now positioned overlapping the island.

Pirate Bay sailing.

The countdown timer indicates that the site will relaunch on 1 February, although no official announcement has been made by the lose collective of “30 to 50 people from all over the world” who apparently run the Pirate Bay.

Rising from the ashes, again

The Swedish investigation, which followed the police raid in December that took the site offline, is still ongoing. The Pirate Bay’s operators claimed they “couldn’t care less” about the raid and site’s shutdown, while one of the site’s founders Peter Sunde suggested that it had outstretched its usefulness and should remain offline.

The phoenix logo was last used by the site in 2006 when the site was taken offline by a police raid on a data centre in Stockholm. When the site came back online shortly after the raid the Pirate Bay used the logo to indicate its rising from the ashes.